Quality Improvement

Lack of leadership support is one of the most common reasons that a quality improvement project fails. Whether it is executive, administrative or frontline leadership you are trying to convince, we have eight field-tested tips that will enable your leaders to not only support your project, but also advocate for it.

Increasing exclusive breastfeeding rates can seem like a lofty goal for some hospitals, particularly when rates hover below 20 percent. Several hospitals participating in NICHQ-led learning collaboratives found a path that not only brought double-digit growth, but also set the stage for Baby-Friendly designation. Now these hospitals are using best practices to sustain breastfeeding rates and improve outcomes in other clinical areas.

To improve the care of its sickle cell patients, Boston Medical Center developed a drug protocol that makes it possible to make quick, accurate decisions about acute care. As a result, the average time to first dose of medication for sickle cell patients experiencing a pain crisis dropped from nearly an hour to 22 minutes. ER staff also stopped second-guessing sickle cell patients asking for pain killers.

From my recent experience at the Infant Mortality Summits, a meeting of the Collaborative Improvement and Innovation Network (CoIIN) to Reduce Infant Mortality, it seems that the time is ripe for the widespread growth of quality improvement (QI) strategies in the public health arena.

August is typically a month for relaxing, vacationing and taking long weekends to enjoy the warm weather. At NICHQ, we get our share of R & R, but August 2014 is also a particularly busy and exciting time! In August, we celebrate National Breastfeeding Month and World Breastfeeding Week (August 1-7), and as part of that, I am excited to help launch NICHQ’s new breastfeeding project with the New York State Department of Health.

To more accurately reflect our purpose, we are making a change in our name, from “healthcare” to “health.” NICHQ’s purpose has always been to improve children’s health. That is our passion and now our name is aligned.

Many years later, the life lessons I learned from my son's first-grade teacher in 1998 are still profoundly influential, especially when viewed through the lens of quality improvement, a framework I learned later in life.

Improvement science teaches us to view outcomes—such as health—as the inevitable product of a system, with the implication that achieving improved outcomes requires changing the system itself. A deep understanding of the system and how it functions can enable smarter decisions about selecting high leverage changes in order to improve system performance.

If you’ve read anything about obesity in the lay press over the past week, you already know that there has been a decline in the prevalence of obesity in American preschoolers.This news is both exhilarating and anxiety provoking. Celebrating too early could distract from the fact that there is so much more work to be done, especially for our most vulnerable children.

We have a long way to go before we get a gold medal in child health outcomes. I suggest we begin in a humble place – with the recognition that, while we may have much to teach other countries, we also have a lot to learn.

Now that I have the opportunity to work for a quality improvement organization with a vision of ensuring each child achieves his or her optimal health, and to process this information through the lens of my own experiences (personal and professional), my heart still breaks for those children harmed by bullying…AND I see great opportunities for improvement.

For as long as I can remember, I have been working to make things more organized, effective and efficient. I have spent countless hours organizing and reorganizing things in my life – everything from my son’s toys and games to the storage of our digital photos. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that I have spent over a decade in project management and just over a year ago, found my way to NICHQ and discovered quality improvement science.

I love Halloween. For one day every year, I get to try something new, look totally silly, celebrate fear and play with possibilities, all without the usual external or internal constraints. Can you imagine what life would be like if we had that freedom all the time?

It never ceases to amaze me what I learn from my children, especially the youngest ones – my eight-year-old twin daughters. I’ve been working in the quality improvement field for longer than they’ve been alive. But now they’re the ones teaching me about it!